Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories

Conclusion

Conclusion This book aims to develop an appropriate hermeneutics for the study of Bavli legal narratives. It begins by recognizing the ways in which the dominant hermeneutics for reading these narratives is limited. The discourse of Jewish legal interpretation has often operated (and continues to operate in many contexts ) with a default understanding of law as a set of rules. This picture of Jewish law encourages readers to transform legal texts that are not penned within the genre of rules into legal rules. In the case of the genre of legal narrative, this occasions a flattening of the story into a singular moral or didactic legal message. The minimization of a legal story’s meaning is often, though not always, performed by readers located within the Bavli (amoraim or the stam). Since the Bavli includes varying layers of interpretation within its pages, its treatment of legal narrative sources frequently includes such a minimization. Though some legal narratives are minimized within the Bavli by named amoraim , a greater number of such narratives are transformed into legal rules by the stam, the anonymous voice that dominates the Bavli and structures the dialogues of the Bavli’s smallest unit, the sugya. Critical scholarship has focused significant energy on the extent to which the stam is responsible for structuring Bavli sugyot and for determining the meaning of the final redacted text we call the Bavli. In some ways, one can conceive of the stam as having created the sugya through the process of digesting the earlier sources it employs in the fabrication of a sugya: each earlier source is not only cited within the sugya but juxtaposed with other sources from which it is distinguished and commented on by the stam. Because the process of the stam’s digestion of a sugya often centers on the production of seemingly contradictory materials, there is a dialectical energy to many legal sugyot characterized by a presentation of contradiction and resolution. Despite the sugya’s celebrated pluralistic diversity of legal positions or midrashic justifications, the poetic energy of the genre is in the direction of minimized controversy and resolution. The mechanics of Bavli questions and answers drives toward a unifying coherence. Conclusion 165 As a source being digested by the stam in the creation of a sugya, the legal narrative represents a genre problem. The hermeneutic drive toward a rule-based understanding of law with energy toward minimized controversy creates the perception that legal narratives are problematic; stories are often interesting because they describe unexpected behavior (behavior that breaches canonicity) and because stories are narrated within a world broader than the narrow discourse of law in which actors’ behavior is motivated by many factors. The perceived problematic nature of legal narrative within the hermeneutics of Jewish law encourages the creation of a different hermeneutics to properly address these sources. This reading methodology moves in the direction of the perceived problems, acting to celebrate the breadth of legal narratives rather than to suppress that breadth. Rather than reading legal narratives within a rules-based discourse of law, the new hermeneutics of talmudic legal narratives imagines an interdisciplinary cultural space within which such texts can be understood to operate. Robert Cover introduced the term nomos to describe a complex legal space whose contours are not completely defined by the rules of law or legal institutions. This complex legal space is one that myths and other narratives help construct and maintain. If one reads Bavli legal narratives within the Bavli nomos, one is not reading such narratives as if they are exceptions to a law established by the rules among which the narratives are juxtaposed. Rather, one recognizes the narratives as texts with an equally strong claim to define legal meaning. Such a reading resists the energy of the dominant Jewish legal hermeneutics by importing into its definition of the legal other discourses such as economics, politics, psychology, and sociology. Moreover, it imports such other fields as equal partners to the legal rules in defining legal meaning. In doing so, legal narratives become the basis for a reading of the legal sugya in toto that often runs counter to the grain of its internal dynamics. If, for example, a legal narrative is highly affected through the emotional behavior of its characters, the dominant hermeneutics of Jewish law (even in the Bavli itself) generally suppresses the emotional material in favor of the rules-based discourse to which the narrative can contribute. But within the complex legal space of the nomos, the...